Summary
- Clunkiness in games can be intentional - adding passion and ambition that screams through despite rough edges.
- Fable, Thief, and Nier exemplify how imperfect mechanics can actually make a game standout amongst the crowd.
- From The Witcher 1 to Spec Ops: The Line, flaws in game mechanics can be overlooked when the narrative and themes are so strong.
In an age where games are made over a half-decade period or longer, we are used to them being polished to a mirror sheen. Yes, they may be buggy, but they are smooth as honey in practice. This can be great at times, though it's a few rough edges that sometimes make a game stand out from the crowd.
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PostsClunkiness in a game can come across in many forms. It can be intentional, a means of forcing the player to feel sluggish. Sometimes it's a limitation of the toolset a developer uses and in certain scenarios a simple lack of mechanical expertise in its creation. The best games, however, no matter how clunky, scream with passion and ambition.
10 Fable
CloseThough Fable now is seen as a cult classic, especially with the reboot from Playground Games bringing the series back into the spotlight, it's important to not remember the original games through rose-tinted glasses. They started as painstaking expressions of British witticisms in a media landscape dominated by American fantasy, and they succeeded regardless of technical know-how.
A life simulator wrapped in a high fantasy wrapper, the original Fable was in equal parts ambitious and busted; you could buy houses, get married, wield magic, and woo the citizens around you with your exploits. These elements didn't always have smooth mechanics in place, but the sheer freedom of the unrestricted systems made it unlike anything else at the time.
9 Thief (2014)
CloseThe original Thief games began as some of the earliest stealth games alongside the likes of Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu, using the first-person perspective to immerse you in your surroundings but also limit just how much spatial awareness you had. It's only logical they would go on to influence the likes of Arkane with Dishonored.
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PostsIn a fitting twist, the 2014 Thief reboot then took from Dishonored in return to make a significantly more quirky game, as the AI on enemies was fairly poor, the environments didn't exactly shine, and the movement was bizarrely restrictive. Yet the parts that worked, like literally hiding in the shadow of an enemy or painstakingly detailed stealing animations added life to an otherwise lifeless city.
8 Nier Gestalt
CloseNieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139...
Action RPG Franchise NieR Platform(s) PS4, Xbox One, PC Powered by Expand CollapseWhile the brainchild of Yoko Taro is a renowned series amongst gamers now, it did not reach its current peak until the critical success of Nier Automata. Nier has always been a thematically heavy series, and Automata was when that was finally recognised; the original, however, was split in two.
Did you know most of the weapons in the Nier games are actually from Drakengard and that magic is a result of a dragon falling in Japan from another universe? Wild stuff.
Nier Replicant exists in a remastered form now, though it lacks many of the rough edges of the original Gestalt. The monotony of walking back and forth across that world for every single quest made the whole thing a slog, yet once you finish the game, you'll weirdly appreciate being forced to stay in that world against your own judgment.
7 The Witcher 1
CloseIt's hard to replicate the highs and lows of a studio like CD Projekt Red, and while The Witcher series has only grown under them, every game sees their extreme crunch come to light in the form of a polished but broken game. Amidst all of these games, none are quite as clunk as the original Witcher.
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PostsBuilt on a modified version of Bioware's Aurora engine, The Witcher was bizarre; character animations were hilariously bad, the actual environments weren't exactly pleasant to traverse, and the combat was a pure slog. Yet looked at retrospectively, it features almost every gameplay element that would define the series and handles them surprisingly well.
6 Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy
Close'Clunk' as a term is usually used as a derivative; games exist and persist despite it, rather than to its advantage. Yet games exist as art meant to elicit feelings from those playing them, and an intentional clunk is an exceptional tool for achieving that, making Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It a great example.
The funny thing about Getting Over It is that it's too precise; the climbing is a painfully delicate ordeal, yet for every failure, you only have yourself to blame. The narration following you will force you to think about this; If it's meant to be hard, why would someone make mechanics purposefully opposed to the player?
5 The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind
CloseThe Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
RPG Franchise The Elder Scrolls Platform(s) PC, Xbox (Original) Powered by Expand CollapseMany games, when you look at them in hindsight, are bursting with passion yet did not have the means to perfectly exact what they wanted to achieve. Think of James Cameron waiting over a decade to create Avatar, and in many ways, that's how Morrowind from Bethesda feels.
It is gloomy, lacks voice-acting in many regards, and uses notes to detail its world instead. The combat is real-time yet also almost entirely chance-based, and there are oddities in the game, yet seeing the rougher elements smoothed down with each new entry makes you miss the bizarre world of Morrowind. The limitations of technology forced it to innovate, and there's nothing quite like it.
A fun fact - Morrowind on the original Xbox would fully reboot the console in the background to save memory.
4 Deadly Premonition
CloseDeadly Premonition
Survival Horror Platform(s) PC, PS3, Switch, Xbox 360 Powered by Expand CollapseYou could write endlessly about how David Lynch has inspired game developers with his works. Remedy is one of the foremost examples of this, with Alan Wake pulling heavily from the style of Twin Peaks, yet none can replicate the exact feel of the show, the meta of its development and all, like Deadly Premonition.
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PostsSet in a sleepy American town in the forest, Agent Morgan must uncover the mystery of the murders taking place; he must also shave, clean his clothes, never go over the speed limit, wait in real-time, and pray that the game never crashes. Sometimes you have to partake in the worst gunplay ever invented, and for all that, you are treated to a story that is as bizarre as the game's mechanical choices.
3 Spec Ops: The Line
CloseReleased in a period awash with games apologetic of war crimes, Spec Ops: The Line could easily dismissed as another one of them. A bunch of white men with tactical gear and gruff voices invading the Middle East in the name of 'Freedom'? Yep, that sounds like Call of Duty alright.
Unbeknownst to just about everyone who played it, Spec Ops: The Line is the 10th entry in the Spec Ops series after a decade hiatus.
The funny thing though is that actually playing Spec Ops isn't that fun, as the gunplay is actually much worse than any respective game and it didn't feel strictly intentional. The level design was simple and there was never much variation, but to actually get a game using its premise as a basis for criticising war and how it's propagated in gaming, it should be commended.
2 Vampyr
CloseWhile Don't Nod came to prominence with Life Is Strange, they started with the character-action game Remember Me. Though never as popular, Don't Nod refuses to forget its origins, and Vampyr came as an attempt to blend the more action-oriented combat of Remember Me with the character-driven choices of Life Is Strange.
Vampyr has you playing as a doctor-turned-vampire during the Spanish Influenza pandemic. Combat is inspired by The Witcher, already an odd choice, and is handled as well as you'd expect, so the game is riddled with bugs and clunky systems, yet actually being forced to choose who lives and dies to make your journey easier makes dealing with the roughness worthwhile.
1 Everything
CloseThough it would be great fun to say this is actually talking about every game in existence, it instead focuses specifically on the singular game, Everything. It itself is meant to be a showcase of everything in existence, so everything is clunky in some twisted way.
Developed by a team of three, it can be hard to make literally everything in existence feel refined, so you end up seeing a cow and the Earth moving in the very same way. It's clunk as an elegant solution, yet offers something of a poetic reading on the game; Everything is relative.
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